Volta Has Guts, Spacey Hurts Story-Torium

The Mars Volta, brainchild of At The Drive In’s Cedric Zavala and Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, is a proudly progressive sound of ambient rock spring-boarded off of ATDI’s exotic punk style. Unlike ATDI, Cedric and Omar have set out to create a sound unclassified by genre and without borders. The band debuts with De-Loused in the Comatorium – a concept album that tells the fictitious story of a man who tries to commit suicide by overdosing on morphine but, instead of dying, falls into a week long coma during which he dreams of elemental battles between things good and bad in his conscience. From the start De-Loused is fast paced with distorted guitars, sampling, and effects. Then it throws you a change-up – the tracks swing greatly between style and tempo to keep things melodically diverse. However, the continuous use of synthetic instruments, looping, and sampling keeps all of the music similar in sound and the album as a whole, unchanging. This works against the band’s plans to play music without boundaries; and while the musicians keep a bombardment of instruments from becoming muddy, Cedrick’s angelic vocals become second to the abstract, spacey sound – making this story musically interesting but hard to follow.